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Category Archives: How I Write

Last night I was writing a section in my WIP where, while riding in a carriage, the female characters engage in exposition as dialogue. Things are getting a little heated when the carriage stops – there is an obstruction in the road. Classic highwayman technique. The driver gets out to let the ladies know what’s happening when he gets shot with an arrow, turns, draws his sword and is slain by two more arrows.

As it turns out, it’s a character known to the ladies who does the killing. Evidently, according to this character, this is a plan to abduct or kill the occupants of the carriage. What no one knows yet, and probably won’t for several dozens of thousands of words, is that this character staged the entire false-attack event to get in the good graces of one of the ladies. There is no plot.

The best part about this? This isn’t in my very detailed outline. The journey in the carriage from point A to point B most assuredly is, but this bit with the arrows and blood and death and all just popped into my head as I was writing.

Just goes to show you that knowing where you started and where you’re going to end up doesn’t necessarily mean you know what’s around the next bend.

As you can see, I’m a bit behind the curve and I know why. I violated one of my rules and did not use the Pomodoro timer at all until yesterday (the word count spike). The new words from today are in week two.

It’s only a few days until NaNoWriMo starts again so I thought I might give you a little bit of encouragement in your attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. What most people don’t understand is that writing the 1667 words you’ll need to write every day is not as difficult as it seems. As a matter of fact it’s as easy as writing a blog post every day.
If you’re in the habit of blogging on a regular basis, and some of you are, then you already have the discipline to write at the “blistering pace” needed to reach the goal. Many other authors, all of far more successful than I am (or probably never will be), will tell you that 50,000 words in a single month is standard for a full-time writer who makes his living from the printed word.
For the purposes of this exercise, and to help you understand that it is very much within your ability to “win” NaNoWriMo, we’re going to take the very blog post you’re reading. Continue reading →

So I plan to have the first three installments of my “Surveillance Pre-dystopia” series, about 60K words, available on October 1.
You’ll have the choice of individual novellas (about 20K words each) or the bundle of three, which will be at a discount to buying them individually.
I’m doing this for three reasons.
The first: I like writing this way (for now). The second: I want to give readers a choice between the shorter and longer reads. The third: I want to test the “Literary Bomb”, AKA the “Lilliana Nirvana Technique”, but I don’t want to hold off on 300K words to do it.

Let me ‘splain…no, there is too much…let me sum up.

If this technique is supposed to send your discoverability through the roof, the size of your work should have less to do with it than the function of carpet bombing the interwebs with said work.
So, I’m going to simultaneously release 4 items this month (#1, #2, #3 and 1-3 bundled). I’ll shoot for 5 simultaneously released titles in November (#4, #5, #6, 4-6 and 1-6 bundled), then do #7, #8, #9,and 7-9 in December. 1-9 might go up as well, but that’s gonna cost $15, so maybe not right away.
So that will be 4 products in October, 5 in November and 4 or 5 in December.

I’ll let you know what happens. December 2014 & January 2015 sales will tell me if this works. If it does, I might just keep doing it this way. If not, back to the drawing board.

This is my first post-by-phone, so if KitKat decides to autocorrect something out of context or insert a random emoji, you’ll know why. 🙂
So in my last post I discovered that I’m, at his stage of my writing career, more interested (or capable) of writing novellas of about 20K words than I am of whacking away at a single novel length manuscript.
To that end, I will be producing these novellas as standalone, complete episodes within a serial story arc.
Think Veronica Mars, the eBook.
Not that the story mimics VM, but the structure might have similarities. This won’t be like House, where the whole story, with slight nods to exterior continuity, is summed up and complete between the credits.
Nor will it be like Lost, a continuing serial story that just runs out of time at 59 minutes, to be continued next week.
Let’s have a few stories that have a beginning, middle and end (or possibly *gasp* five acts), and are microcosms of the entire work, itself with a beginning, middle and end.
How about 9 of them?
Three episodes of about 20K words (available independently at 99¢), combined into a larger ‘Part One’ of about 60K words (about 200 pages) done three times for a trilogy of about 600 combined pages.Bah! Artists don’t write to word count!
Perhaps not, but professional writers do.
I’m a storyteller and a publisher, not an artist. There is art to writing, no doubt, but I’ll take your filthy lucre if those artists over yonder don’t want to taint their art with it. I don’t even think ‘author’ has the same meaning anymore.
But whatever.
What I’m trying to say is that in the next 3 months, starting in September, look for about 20 new products from me, of various lengths and combination.
And yes, I just called my books (my babies, my art) a product. Because that’s what publishers do; they sell products, and I’m wearing my publisher’s hat, not my writer’s cap.

So, in the last nine hours, I did eight hours of writing, taking a 10-15 minute break every hour.
My average is 1938 words per hour, though I admit I lost focus in hour 8 (the 7th hour of writing).
My best output was hour 6, 3030 words in that hour or 50.5 words per minute. Considering I took a small break in each hour, the Words-Per-Minute are a little higher.